Ingrid Fetell Lee

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Ingrid Fetell Lee: designer, author and joy-finder

Full transcript

“In a lighthearted time, it’s easier to find joy. But in a time like this, it’s no less important, and joy is a really critical part of what makes us resilient.”
– Ingrid Fetell Lee

Madeleine Dore: For those of you who have been listening from the beginning of this season, you probably know that this podcast took me a very long time to finally begin. For a long time, I felt like I was in a creative desert, a creative drought. 

As Julia Cameron describes in The Artist’s Way, “Creative droughts are times in between dreams, listless dry seasons.” For me, the drought that preceded starting this podcast felt like a time in my life devoid of joy. Even though, when I look back, I was surrounded by it. But I don’t really know if I was paying attention.

This idea of paying attention to joy and delight comes up again and again in The Artist’s Way. As Julia Cameron writes, “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.” She also says things like, “Become internally clear on dreams, desires, and delights,” or, “Only when we are being joyfully creative can we release the obsession with others and how they are doing.” That magnificent comparison trap. 

So these droughts can be internal, and they can also be external, as some of us might be experiencing right now. But what I’ve learned is that they can be shifted, patiently. It’s a learning and relearning, and of course there’s no shift that pays off in a linear fashion. Just like this podcast, there can be a lot of stopping and starting, to finally beginning.

We do eventually move through our droughts. I do believe that. As Julia Cameron writes, “Droughts end because we have not collapsed to the floor of our despair and refused to move. We have doubted, yes, but we have stumbled on.”

I stumbled on. It took much longer than I would’ve liked or predicted, but I remained upright and sat with listlessness. This eventually allowed me to pay attention to something that was always simmering inside. A curiosity, an opening, and a capacity for noticing joy and delight.

We often hear that emotions such as joy are cultivated from within, but for designer Ingrid Fetell Lee, there is a strong possibility that it can be found in our surroundings.

For other a decade, Ingrid has been devoted to answering the question: How do tangible things create intangible joy? Both through her blog of The Aesthetics of Joy and her incredibly insightful book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. Her ongoing investigation explores the powerful connection between our surroundings and our emotions, and shares how we can find more joy in daily life, even in difficult times.

In this conversation, we talk about the aspects of joy that are challenged now, but why it’s more valuable than ever, the relationship between joy and resilience, planning what’s important but giving yourself permission to be flexible, why sometimes we just aren’t ready yet for that big project, the wonderful nature of surprises, and allowing for the rise and fall of joy and sorrow.

So, given joy, like all human emotions, can ebb and flow, here’s Ingrid Fetell Lee on how she is today.

Ingrid Fetell Lee: I’m well today. You’re right, it’s a bit of a roller coaster in these pandemic times, but I’m actually seven months pregnant right now, so I’m very much focused on the near future, and I think that’s something that has been an unexpected joy during this period. Is to realise that, while there’s so much uncertainty, I, and my husband of course, are in this moment of frenzy preparation, so there’s a lot of anticipation, there’s a lot of excitement, so even with all of the uncertainty and instability, we have this built-in source of hope and joy in our lives.

MD: Oh, how wonderful. And it so beautifully ties into one of my favourite parts of your book, which is the chapter on transcendence and how it goes into the small self. And it’s interesting that I’ve been feeling that as well. Our worlds, for some of us, feel a lot smaller because our spaces that we’re confined to might be smaller, our interactions might be smaller.

But I’ve even felt like my ambition has become smaller, in a really lovely way. I’m wondering if you think that that’s a common experience or unique to these times?

IFL: It’s interesting. I think if we can find ways to zoom out, really what that small self-experience is referring to is research that has been done on the phenomenon of awe and the way that, when we experience something really vast or really tall in nature, or just something that’s so conceptually vast that it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it, we feel smaller ourselves. Psychologists have found that we actually will draw ourselves as smaller when we’re in the presence of something really vast.

And so I think there’s something very calming about this small self-experience. That we feel maybe more connected to nature, to other people, to the universe, and of course we’re all going through this experience largely together right now. We’re all in different stages of it, but we’re all on hold together, and I think that that kind of oneness or that kind of unity can create the conditions for this pleasurable self-transcendence, where we become more aware of what’s going on around us and less caught up in the minutiae of our day-to-day lives.

MD: Yeah, it’s such a wonderful frame for it. I wonder how you’re currently moving through your days? Your Instagram feed alone has been a real balm, just sprinkling through really accessible things that people can do to find the joy, or even just find permission to feel joy right now. So what do your days look like currently?

IFL: I am fortunate that I’m able to work from home, so I’m able to keep doing what I love and the main thing that I’m focused on right now is really answering a lot of the questions that have been coming my way in terms of how we find joy during a moment like this. And I think that, for me, this question is really important because in a lighthearted time it’s easier to find joy, but in a time like this, it’s no less important. And joy is a really critical part of what makes us resilient.

There’s research that shows that little moments of joy help our cardiovascular systems recover from the physiological effects of stress, and that it also helps us cope with tragic or difficult events in our life, and bounce back better than we were before. So I think it’s really important that we gives ourselves permission to feel joy in these times, so I feel like I’m getting a lot of questions about how do we find joy in these times, and is it okay if I can’t find joy, and is it okay if I do find joy because I feel guilty about it?

So I have been spending a lot of time trying to create resources and give virtual talks and workshops and things like that to assuage some of the guilt or the fears, give people permission, remind them that joy is actually not just something that you can find in a crisis but something that can be really valuable in this moment. And so it’s a mix of that and setting up a nursery and trying to get ready in whatever ways that you can get ready for a change of this magnitude.

MD: I’d love to go into some of those ways to find joy and to build joy in a moment, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about, I guess, the specifics of what balancing those two things looks like in a day. Are you someone who is quite routined, would you say? Do you have a regular waking time? Or what does it look like from the moment the day breaks for you?

IFL: I have been trying to give myself permission to be flexible. I am generally a morning person, but I think because I’m physically getting bigger, I know that I can’t always count on a great night’s sleep, so I’m really trying to listen to my body and if it is a get up and go day, then I’m up and at ‘em. I do prenatal workouts to try to stay moving, except on the weekends when I try to slow down. My husband and I go for a walk whenever we can outside. We happen to be lucky to be about five minutes’ drive from a Bayside beach, so we try to take walks whenever we can, so sometimes that happens in the morning, sometimes that happens at the end of the day, but that’s a breath of fresh air, literally, and quite soothing.

Other things that I do, I try to get some writing done every day. I’m trying to plan out to take a real maternity leave, which is an interesting thing as an independent writer and entrepreneur, to try to figure out how to set yourself up to take time off, because I’m so used to being always on. So I’m doing a lot of preparations and trying to write things ahead of time, and that’s, of course, an interesting challenge because I don’t know exactly what the world is going to look like in August when I’m going to be on leave, but I’m trying to write things that are addressing some of the questions that I’m getting now.

So I do try to sit down on my computer sometime between nine and ten, but I’m flexible. I think one of the things that’s been lovely about being home is the freedom to bake in the middle of the day if I feel like it, or cook myself a really beautiful lunch, which I’ve always loved, but I used to be on the go all the time so would just have to settle for whatever I could get. Now, lunch is a real thing, so that’s fun. And sometimes my husband is able to eat with me. Sometimes we’re not on the same schedule because we’re both working from home, but that’s nice.

I’m trying to think what else. There’s usually some part of the day devoted to baby planning, whether that is setting up and designing the nursery, whether that is learning. I’m learning all sorts of hypnosis techniques for labour, so there’s all kinds of things that go into that. Things I didn’t even know about before I started this journey, so I’m just trying to get smart and get ahead of things, so there’s usually at least a few minutes carved out of every day for that.

MD: I’m always really interested when someone does have to define their own day and their own to-do list because they’re working for themselves, and especially in your situation where you’re doing work for the future. It’s a really interesting thing to be self-motivated for. How do you determine what is enough for a day in terms of how much work you might have done, and still finding that softness and flexibility with it?

IFL: It’s so hard. I think one thing that has really helped me, a tool that’s really helped me, is a planner. It’s called Cultivate What Matters. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it?

MD: No.

IFL: It’s a goals planner and basically it walks you through a process that you do at the end of a year, at the beginning of a year, where you take stock of a lot of different aspects of your life. I think one of the most useful questions that is asked in the planner is ‘What’s going to matter to you when you’re 80?’

And you really do a zoom out on your life and think about what are the things that I really want to make happen over the course of this year? And they could be things in my personal life, my professional life. It’s not just for work. You set a series of goals for the year, and then you can revisit them every quarter, and I think the piece of the system that’s been really helpful for me is that there is a list of monthly actions, weekly actions, and daily actions that you create and it’s a one-page list and I tape it into my notebook and I usually plan my week based on that.

So there’s a maximum of ten things that you can allow yourself to take on in any given month and you chart your progress on those things. And so I build my week based on those bigger things. So, for me, it’s helpful because it connects everything to a bigger goal. One of my goals for this year, at the very beginning of the year, was to take some form of a real maternity leave. I’ve been trying to have a kid for a long time and so, for me, it’s really important for me to be able to take the time off and get to spend that with my kid, but I’ve also built a community and it’s really important to me that I also don’t just disappear.

So wanting to serve both of those objectives was a really important goal for me, and so to know that each day I’m working toward that. I’ve outlined, based on this, about how much I want to create for the time that I’m out and then I can break it out by week and see how much I really need to achieve in a week. And some weeks I don’t make it, and I’m a constantly over-ambitious person, so I’m always falling a little short but I feel, I think because I now have a framework for seeing it, it’s much easier for me to give myself the grace to say okay, I didn’t hit it this week, but I know what I’m working towards and I think it cuts out a lot of the kinds of doing things that aren’t leading you anywhere. It really does help you stay focused on the things that matter.

MD: Yeah, thank you so much for breaking that down. That’s really great to hear. I do something similar and when you said this over-ambitious part of it, I definitely have a tendency to overcrowd how many of these goals I might be breaking down. I think that’s a common thing, it’s almost an optimistic thing, to overcrowd our to-do lists because we think we can achieve more, but what do you do? 

I think you touched on it there in terms of giving yourself grace when you don’t meet a certain goal, but I’m wondering if there’s, for me, there’s clear things that have been on this list for probably five years, and I’m wondering if this relates back to your book proposal for The Aesthetics of Joy? You first had that idea in 2009 and it wasn’t until 2016 that it came to be, and that is such a comfort to hear. I just wonder, was there something similar in terms of putting it off month after month? Or what was going on behind the scenes there with that timeline?

IFL: Well, I think that one thing that I’ve learned from both the system and that experience is that there is a time for everything. Sometimes if it’s rolling over from month to month, there may be a reason for that. You just may not be ready for it yet, and I know I’ve had moments where I’m just not ready for something yet. So I try to say, okay, you know what? That didn’t happen this month, but something else did. It would be a problem for me if none of the goals moved forwards.

But I think what I found since I started using the system is that something always moves forward. It just might not be the thing that I thought was most important, and so it may be that I danced around it a little bit because I just wasn’t ready to get myself into it. But I think knowing that it just may not have been the right time is what allows me to give myself space to let go and not beat myself up about not finishing something in a given period.

MD: I love that. It’s just that reminder that you might not be ready yet and just have that space for it to develop. Thank you.

IFL: I think we all need that sometimes. I know I need to hear it, and so I try to practice talking to myself the way I would talk to a friend. And I’ve learned from this. So, to go back to the experience with my book, I decided I wanted to write this book when I was in grad school and I was just starting to study this idea of the aesthetics of joy and I thought, this could be a book. I really want to write this book.

I did the bold thing of committing to it by telling everyone I was writing a book, which is a great way to put yourself on the hook. So when people would ask me what I do, I would say, “I’m a design grad student and also I’m writing a book about joy,” and that’s really what I would say for the entire, I don’t know, seven to eight-year period that I was working on this. So as I started to get into it, I quickly connected with an agent and I had this conversation with her about it and she was excited and she wrote down for me what I would need to do to write a book proposal, and I just couldn’t get myself to make progress on this proposal. It just felt too big, and I think one of the things that held me back was I had this fantasy of what this book would be in my mind. And it was so hard. Every time I sat down to write, it just was nothing near what I had dreamed up.

And so I kept blogging along the way, and I think that was really helpful. It was helpful and it was also a distraction, so sometimes I would say, okay, I’m going to make a dent in the book proposal today, and then I would sit down and I would write three blog posts, and I would think, okay, well, at least I did something on the project itself. And then the next weekend, I would say, okay, I’m going to really make a dent in this book proposal. Then I would blog again.

So blogs can be great, but they can also be a distraction because they’re bite-sized and they have immediate feedback. A book proposal does not have immediate feedback. It’s a long, slow thing, whereas when you write blog posts, you get comments, you get feedback, it’s very reinforcing. So that’s how things proceeded for a period of time, and I felt really guilty.

And then the agent that I had met at the time left agenting. She wasn’t even working as an agent anymore, and I thought oh my god, I’ve been working on this so long that I don’t even have an agent because my agent isn’t even an agent anymore. 

MD: Oh, I love this.

IFL: And so then I really started to beat myself up. I also, the other really important fact in this, is that the day I presented my Master’s thesis, which was the beginning of the research that went into this book, I got my dream job offer to go work at IDEO as a design researcher. I couldn’t turn down the dream job. So I went to work at IDEO, and I had a lot to learn there and I really loved working there, I worked there for six years, and so this became my side project. It became the thing I did on mornings before I’d go to work, or on weekends, and that was its own kind of challenge because sometimes work would be very intense and it would be very hard to keep up with the blog or to keep up with working on a book proposal. And so there were years that would slip by and I really wasn’t doing much. 

At the same time, I was trying to make progress in whatever ways I knew how, and some of the things that I did during that period, I had an Evernote file for each of the chapters and any time I would see any research or any stories or anecdotes that were related to that chapter, I would just drop it into that folder, so I was gathering. I had a set of index cards, I would read books or journal articles on the subway on my commute to work, and I would take notes on index cards and then I would file them. I had this filing system on the wall with little pieces of fabric holding these little packets of index cards, so I would go into my studio area of my apartment and I would see all these index cards on the wall, and any time I would finish reading a book or a study, I would file all the index cards with their appropriate chapter.

So I was making progress. It just didn’t crystalise. It didn’t look like I was making any progress, and I would have people in my life who would be like, hey, how’s that book coming? And I would say, you know, it’s coming. And I would feel really guilty, I’d feel really ashamed, like I just wasn’t making it happen. And these people, because I told them I was writing this book and they were excited about it, they were losing faith in me.

There were a lot of bad and shameful feelings that came with this process. At the same time, I look back and I think that I can’t believe how rigorous I was with all these little things that were moving it forward in the day-to-day.

MD: Exactly, and it goes back to your beautiful point before of maybe sometimes you’re not ready yet, but yet things are moving forward. It just might not be that big thing you thought it was. But reading the book, it’s remarkable how you’ve been able to really make the intangible tangible with each chapter in those ten ingredients for joy. And even just the beautiful people that you feature, the beautiful projects, and each time you wrap up a chapter, it almost brings a tear to the eye, the way that you’ve written it. You’ve really laid out joy in a way that no one ever has before, and I feel like that’s not a task that can be done in a year or two.

Looking back, what propelled you to actually start writing, after all that wonderful gathering?

IFL: Thank you for those kind words, and I really appreciate that. For me, it was a conversation with the writer Virginia Postrel, who has been a friend a mentor to me over the years, and I remember telling her. She was one of the people who I felt like I was disappointing every time I would see her, and the book was no further along. And she said to me, “It will be a richer book because you’re taking the time to gather.” It was exactly what you just said.

It really changed my perspective on it because [25:17] I realised that all those little stories and anecdotes, it’s a bit like a bird building a nest. They find this little twig here, and this little piece of ribbon, and sometimes you’ll see the funniest things woven into those nests because of what they’ve managed to collect from all around, and that is how this book came together for me. And I know that it would’ve have been as rich a book without all those years of gathering.

Some of the stories came my way only through conversations at a dinner party with someone I only met once, and they were pivotal stories in the book. I never would’ve learned about them if it hadn’t been for that one person that I talked to about it. So just having the project and actually talking about it openly for so many years, I think, is what this book richer. And also because I had the blog, people would send me things, so I was constantly being sent examples of joy in the world.

MD: Makes such sense. So how do you think you finally, I’m not going to use the word unstuck because it doesn’t seem like, in hindsight, you were stuck. You were gathering. So what was the catalyst to begin the writing, or the bulk of it, do you think?

IFL: So here’s what happened. I had recently got married and I thought, okay, I’m done with planning a wedding, all these things that have been excuses for so many years are no longer excuses, I’m going to give this one last go. And so I was trying to get up in the mornings and work on the proposal and I dusted it off and I was starting to work on it, and it wasn’t going particularly well, but I had the intention.

And then I met Adam Grant, the organisational psychologist, I met him when he was giving a talk at IDEO, and I started talking to him about my book and he said that sounds interesting, and he was interested in connecting me to some agents. I said okay, and I walked away from that conversation still not feeling ready. So I never followed up.

A week or two later, I got an email from him that said, “Hey, do you still want an intro?” and I thought, okay, if I say no now, I’m really running away from it. I’m really running away from it. So I better say yes. So I said yes. He said great, send me a paragraph and a bio, so I agonised over a paragraph of what this book was about and he made an introduction, one of those very lucky life-changing introductions to someone who really understood the book, and just really got it. I think I’ll be forever grateful for that. Very serendipitous moment.

I think the first piece was just connecting and the second piece was actually like, okay, get me a proposal, and I sat down and furiously wrote because, at this point, opportunity is saying finish this, so I did. When he read it, he said it’s 85% of the way there so we worked to get it into a place where it was ready to be shared and found the right publisher for it. But I think it was just such an incredible experience to find someone who understood my original ambition for it and pulled me back toward the big dream I had.

Having someone who understood the vision was transformative because it then motivated me to really do the big thing that I was so scared to do.

MD: Yes. Oh, that’s such an incredible story. Especially because, not only can an individual not quite be ready, but also the world around them has to be ready too. Imagine if you had have settled and not created the vision for the book that you wanted to. I think it’s wonderful, this serendipity of it, as you said, and, I keep saying one of my favourite chapters, but it will turn out to be all of them, but the chapter on surprise.

To me, it sounds like a very serendipitous, those moments of surprise, that can really shift your daily life and I love how the chapter goes into small surprises that can shift our days, or at least shake them, and not [inaudible 30:09] our days. I was wondering if that’s a nice segue to talk a little bit about surprise, and maybe how, even though it’s counterintuitive, it can be built into our days.

IFL: Right. I mean, surprise is the catalyst for so much. It’s the catalyst for creativity, it’s the catalyst for seeing the world in a different way and a new way, it definitely breaks the monotony. I think, right now, surprise is probably one of the most important things that we can seek out, while we’re in the midst of this challenging time because so many of us are reduced in our movements. We are staying home, and so we’re not subjected to the constant sensation and serendipity that we have in moving through a city or moving through our daily lives.

So I think [31:04] cultivating surprise is really important and, while it does seem like something that we can’t cultivate, surprise is supposed to catch us off guard, I think we can set up the conditions for surprise. One of the things that I love to do is just hide things, and there are lots of ways to hide things from yourself or from others. Not in a way that makes it hard for them to find, but in a playful way. So, for example, in his house we have painted cabana stripes in the front closet and it’s fun because we don’t open that closet all the time. We open it when we’re leaving the house or we’re going to the beach or if we’re grabbing a coat, but whenever you open it, you get hit again with this reminder of this beachy, sunny, yellow stripe and it’s this very joyful thing. You can do that by painting a bold colour in a room you don’t use that often, you can put wallpaper on the inside of your closet or drawer liners, or I’ll often tuck things into handbags that I don’t use that often, or pockets. 

So having little surprises embedded in your space can be a way to bring back memories. If I find a shell on the beach, I’ll often leave it in a jacket pocket and then when the seasons change, and then change again, I get to find it again and remember that day. So I think there are all kinds of ways we can surprise ourselves.

MD: Oh, how delightful. I just love that use of colour in the room. Something in your book that I found interesting was this idea of chromophobia and how it’s actually this fear of making a choice that might make us fearful of the use of colour, and I think that, just broadly, that fear of making a choice can create such tension in our creative lives and in our daily lives. So what have you uncovered about injecting these things into our lives? Or have you had to wrestle with this fear of making a choice?

IFL: I think we all fear that to some extent, and I gained a new understanding of that when I had a coach a few years back who pointed out to me that the root of the word ‘decide’ is ‘cide’, which means to kill. So when we choose something, when we decide on something, we’re killing off another option, and I think that can be very hard because we feel like we’re killing off another possibility and we often want to keep those options open.

I think some of us get tripped up at different levels of that decision making. It can certainly be paralysing in a creative process. I know it was in some of those earlier stages with the book because, when you have a vision of a book, but you haven’t really put words to paper yet, all possibilities are still alive. So when you have to kill all the other possibilities except the book you’re writing, it gets really hard and I think that’s one of the things that can keep us stuck.

So letting go and, again, having someone who understands the vision that you’re excited about and can nudge you in that direction and help you let go of those alternative possibilities can be really powerful. I think in the home, in the day-to-day, it’s equally important to recognise that, when we stay in suspended animation, when we don’t choose, we’re choosing to stay stuck. If we can’t choose a colour for our walls because we’re in love with all of them, or we’re afraid we’re going to choose the wrong one, then we’re choosing to live this life with white or beige walls, or whatever it is, and I think just recognising that you can make a choice, and it doesn’t always have to be the right one because there is actually no right at the end of the day. There’s just what feels good to you. I think that’s what has been most liberating for me.

MD: Yeah, and we don’t actually know the outcomes of our decisions as much as we like to think, or have the control over them, so just picking one. I love that as an exercise. I’m wondering, just a moment ago you mentioned that, with the pandemic and the reduced aspect to our daily lives in many ways, it’s all the more important for things like surprise but it can seem more difficult.

There are a few other aspects, I think, of joy that might be in a similar boat in terms of maybe abundance. It’s difficult now to have an expanse of space. I’m wondering what you’re finding in adjusting this idea of finding joy to these times.

IFL: I think you’re exactly right. There are certain aspects of joy that are more challenged right now than others, and abundance is one of them. Especially because, when I talk about abundance, what I mean is not a ton of stuff, it’s sensations. The sensorial abundance, the feeling of different smells that you encounter on your walk to the train, or different sounds that you encounter as you move about your daily life, and I think we lose a lot of that when we stay home and we stay in these confined spaces.

So, really, adding sensorial variety back into your home can be a powerful thing to do at a moment like this. That might mean thinking about the scents that you love and either getting a scented candle or some form of aromatherapy to bring those scents back into your space. Even for me, I’ve noticed my moisturiser that smells like creamsicles, and I just try to take a moment longer to inhale that every time I put it on because that brings me a moment of joy.

Texture. Having something soft over your work chair. I have a sheepskin on mine that makes it soft. But just thinking about the textures your feet encounter, or your hands encounter as you move through your home. The sounds, maybe bringing in more nature sounds, more opening of the windows so you can get the sounds of the outdoors. 

Just being mindful that you bring some variety to the sensations in your world because your world has got smaller. I think that can be a powerful way to create joy right now.

MD: They’re such lovely examples. Back to that transcendence idea about that upward attention, you know, we find that idea of transcendence when we’re floating or flying or above, and yet so much of our daily lives, our attention, is downward into our devices. How are you navigating the pull of the digital world at the moment?

IFL: It is so hard. It is so hard because the digital devices pull us in and down, exactly as you say, and the rest of the world tends to pull us out and up, so making sure that we get outside can be a really important thing, if we’re able to get outside. I think you can also use other mechanisms to have that experience virtually, whether that’s aerial views. I find aerial views to be a way to give yourself that zoom out. You can get that through a digital device, but it still feels like you’re floating or flying.

Nature programmes will also give you that sense of space, so you feel like you can expand out a little bit and breath, so I think that can be helpful even if you can’t get outside. But definitely being able to get outside and just reminding yourself to look up.

I know someone who suggests counting chimneys as a way to train your eye to look upward when you’re walking around, so that’s one thing you can do, or just look at rooflines and see what’s on the roof. That can be another way to get yourself to look up when you’re out and about.

MD: I also think that this idea of the cyclical nature of joy, maybe that can be something that’s really important to remember right now, that this will pass. Was it the spring comes when it’s…?

IFL: Spring comes when it’s time. From the cherry master.

MD: Do you think that’s a relevant lesson? Now and always, I suppose.

IFL: I think always. Just to give some colour on that example, one of the things that I did when I was researching this book was to go to Japan to see the cherry blossoms. I almost missed them, but I got there just in time, and I wanted to see his phenomenon because the whole country of Japan goes giddy for a period of time and there’s a real bittersweetness to it and I remember talking to a woman while I was there who said, “I feel sad and happy at the same time when I look at them.”

And I think that’s a very common feeling that you feel, acutely aware of how fleeting this joy is because it is so transient and everything in life is like that. It’s just an intense version of it. And this quote, “Spring comes when it’s time,” comes from a beautiful documentary called The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, about the Fukushima disaster and the blossoming of the cherries right in the wake of that disaster and how powerful and poignant that joy was for the people who were struggling to recover from this. To see that moment of spring, of blossoming, right in the midst of their struggle.

And I think this recognition that the cycles of nature are continually happening can be really powerful reminders that, even when joy ebbs for a period of time, it will come back again. And what I’ve learned, I think, that has been so important from my research is that [41:46] joy is not a constant state. We’re not going to always be able to feel joy. And, even when it’s hard, we shouldn’t force ourselves to feel joy. We should allow ourselves the rise and fall because it’s our ability to feel sorrow that determines our ability to feel joy. We feel our joy in proportion to our ability to feel sorrow and other emotions.

And so what we’re aiming for is a full, rich, emotional life. Not a flat one. Because when we numb ourselves to pain and to sorrow, we lose the edge of our joy as well.

MD: So beautifully put. To bring that back to your days, I wonder whether you experience a misconception that you must be perfectly joyful and have all these kinds of wonderful joy finding habits scattered through your day. What would be the behind the scenes of that?

I guess I’m trying to bring this back, this idea of the ebb and flow, and how you see that in just your days, as well as a bigger cycle of years or times?

IFL: I would say the first piece is to recognise that, like, anyone else, I have down days, I have days where I struggle, I’ve had days during this period where I’ve burst into tears randomly. I think the pregnancy hormones add to that, but I’m an emotional person. I’ve always been an emotional person. And that means that I really feel my emotions, I react to them, and I think one of the things that has helped me is to acknowledge that emotions are going to wash over me. But they aren’t me.

[43:39] I think we have a linguistic thing that we do that’s problematic a little bit, where we say, “I am happy” or “I am sad”. We’re basically creating an equation between ourselves and that emotion, as opposed to saying, “I feel happy,” or “I feel sad,” or “I feel joyful,” or “I feel angry.” I think separating ourselves a little bit, giving that a little of space, can be really helpful and so one of the things that I do when I have really challenging emotions is to visualise them a little bit, like a space I’m moving through.

So I’m moving through a moment of sadness, or a moment of longing, or a moment of loss, and that’s okay. I can move through that. But I’m still me in the midst of that. So, for example, I think one of the really challenging things that I’ve been dealing with recently is the continually fluctuating recommendations around what’s going to happen when I go into labour, and so there was a period of time at the most acute moment of the crisis where we were still figuring out what was happening and I live in New York where we were trying to figure out if we were going to give birth in the city, as we originally planned, or are we going to give birth out here where we’re saying, which is outside the city, and the hospitals started restricting people to not having anyone with you in the room during labour because they’re trying to protect healthcare workers and they’re trying to protect pregnant women and their babies, of course, but I’d already got used to the thought that my doula wouldn’t be there, but now my husband can’t even be there, and I’m going to be alone and it’s the first time I’ve done it. And I was very fearful and very upset.

Now they’ve changed that policy and now you can have someone, so hopefully, if things stabilise and continue to stay the way they are, my husband will be able to be with me. But I think life isn’t all roses for anyone and recognising that you’re going to go through these ups and downs and it’s a process, it’s a period you’re moving through, as opposed to taking over everything, I think that’s been the biggest lesson for me.

MD: Yes, thank you for that. So I guess maybe a peep at the end of your days would be lovely. I know obviously they ebb and flow too, but is there any sort of rituals for joy in the evening? How do you unwind?

IFL: Sure, there are a few things. One is that my husband and I eat dinner together every night. We take turns cooking and we usually watch something, but not always, and then I’m someone who needs some wind downtime before I go to bed. One of the things that I’ve been doing lately to wind down is that I’ve recently launched a community called the Joy Spotter Society on Facebook and it’s a place for people to post the things that bring them joy, and we actually have a theme of the week, but it’s people all around the world just sharing pictures of things that bring them joy.

And it has been such a joyful thing to scroll through those before I wind down and go to bed, and so I do that, and then I usually try to read a book. I try to put the phone down before I go to sleep, otherwise it’s too hard, but definitely scrolling the joy, as opposed to scrolling the news. I don’t like to scroll the news at night because I think it doesn’t set me up well for sleep, so scrolling through joyful things and responding to some of those comments and messages is something that brings me a lot of joy, and then usually I read something and fall asleep.

MD: Oh, I love that, building that joyful thing in to end the day. Is there anything else that you might do every day?

IFL: I mentioned I’m really into lunch. I’m a really big breakfast person too, so usually there’s some set up for breakfast the night before, so that’s a thing that I always do. So I do overnight oats with coconut usually, and usually there’s some kind of nuts and, I don’t know, all sorts of things. We just organised the pantry and it brought me so much joy because now I can see all the different toppings that I put on my overnight oats and I make these bowls that bring me so much joy. So that’s a thing that I usually do the night before. So breakfast is a thing.

MD: Yeah. Oh, delicious, and it’s also lovely that it’s a bowl and goes back to what you talk about so much in the book about round things being joyful.

IFL: Right, totally. So there’s that, there’s checking on the plants and making sure that they are watered and taken care of. Actually, one of the things that I often do while I eat breakfast in the morning is watch the birds. We have a bird feeder in the backyard, and they tend to be very active in the morning, and so that’s always a joyful thing.

When springtime comes, we don’t have it set up yet, but the garden is not quite growing yet, but once the garden is up, I usually go outside and sit under an umbrella for a couple hours in the morning and write, and there’s a hummingbird who comes by so I usually sit facing the garden so I can watch the hummingbird and spend the morning outside. So we’re coming up on it. I’m so excited the weather is getting warmer, to be able to do that. 

So those are two other rituals. I’m not a huge ritual person. I tend to take the day as it comes, but those are things that I do enjoy every day.

MD: It’s such lovely small pockets of joy when they do pop up in the day. And I think your book, what it does so beautifully, is really teach us that joyfulness isn’t frivolous and that there’s no one way to be joyful. You don’t have to stick to a rigid, joyful ritual, and that is really is just about embracing where you are. 

Back to the beginning, you mentioned those feelings of guilt around currently experiencing joy in this frame that we’re in, and I wondered if you had any final words on that to someone who might be hesitant to step into the joy, or struggling to find it, or just this idea of finding what it is for you?

IFL: I think it’s important to understand that the reason that we often feel silly or frivolous engaging in joyful things or acknowledging our joy or allowing that it is, in western culture, we tend to equate joy with childishness. Because of that, we tend to see joy as frivolous, as silly, as superficial. And so recognising that joy isn’t actually silly or frivolous at all, but that [51:19] it’s a hardwired emotion, it’s universal across humanity, it’s one of six primary emotions that we all feel and it’s the only positive one, and that it is deeply connected to our wellbeing, that it is something that relieves stress, it’s something that deepens our connection to other people.

When married couples share more joyful moments, they tend to feel greater trust connection and intimacy. Joy even has been shown in some studies to make us more productive, up to 12% more productive according to some studies. So there are lots of reasons why joy is not a frivolous thing at all, but actually something that is connected to our thriving. If we can remember that, I think it is helpful in giving ourselves permission to take these little moments and savour them, and magnify them, and share them, or make them for others.

MD: Ingrid Fetell Lee reminds us that joy can be found right where we are. Joy is not childish or frivolous. It’s a powerful feeling that can build resilience and improve our wellbeing. It can come in the form of colour, of surprise, of a scent, sound. It can be wild and free, organised and playful. It can turn mundane moments into magic. It can be cyclical. It ebbs and flows. It can show up when we least expect it, and it can also be honed.

My own experience getting out of the creative desert, as well as speaking to Ingrid, taught me that joy is something to pay attention to, both within us and around us.

I’m reminded of an extract from a lecture by philosopher Alan Watts. As he says, “So you see, to spread joy, you have to have it. To impart delight, you have to be, more or less, delightful. And to be delightful is not some factor of trying to make yourself look delightful. It is to do things that are delightful to you. You become, thereby, delightful to others. That’s to say, people who are interesting are people who are interested.”

Obviously, life won’t always be joyful, but just like all our human feelings, it’s always been there, and we can turn our attention to it, inspect it, and become interested, thereby becoming interesting.